Steam Survey: Most PC Gamers Have Weaker PCs Than PS4, Xbox One

Valve released a new survey for August detailing who is using what and how much. While a lot of the numbers aren't very surprising, the majority of the 50 million or so users of Steam seem to be slightly underpowered compared to what the next-gen consoles will be packing. Thus, the PC Master Race has shed a tear.

Blues spotted the hardware survey of August on Steam's site, giving a visual breakdown of the numerical values for the average Steam user's PC. The survey is optional so everyone who partook willingly did so, there was no Origin PC scanning going on like a certain other digital distribution portal I just named.

So what do the stats say? How do they stack up and why are so many PC gamers not really exhibiting the qualities of a Gaming Master Race? Well, most gamers have the OS potential to ramp up on par to the PS4 or Xbox One, both of which contain 8GB of RAM (the PS4 is rocking shared GDDR5 and the Xbox One houses DDR3). 54.08% of PC gamers are using a Windows 7 64-Bit OS, which enables users to house more than 4GB of RAM. From there, the 64-bit version of Windows 8 came in second with 14.58% of the Steam share, followed by Windows 7 (standard), Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista and then Windows 8 (standard).

With all that said about the operating systems above, majority of Steam users admitted to having about 8GB of RAM. While that might seem like they're on par to the home consoles, sadly many admit to only having a system that houses 1GB of VRAM... so, if the Wii U had an emulator, most Steam users wouldn't be able to run any Wii U games with their video cards. Heck, you know it's bad when Nintendo can laugh and claim to have better hardware than you. Tsk, tsk.

Speaking of video cards... majority of Steam users are rocking DirectX 11 GPUs. In fact, 64.78% have a DX11 GPU while only 29.4% have a DX10 GPU and only 1.75% have a DX9 GPU. So yeah, majority of Steam users have an equivalent GPU to what's in the Xbox One and PS4. Also, majority of users prefer Nvidia over everyone else, 52.38% to be exact. AMD came in second with 33.08% usage rates and Intel and their pathetic integrated graphics processing units that aren't good enough to display the shaders used to render the shine on Jabba the Hutt's arse, came in third with 14.18% of the pie.

Also, sadly, 47.34% of Steam users are only rocking dual-core CPUs with 73.6% favoring Intel and 21.50% maintaining between 2.3 and 2.69ghz processors. This is definitely a step behind the Jaguar architecture in the PS4 and Xbox One. However, at least 44.24% of Steam users are housing quad-core processors in their machines. It makes up for the poor folk with dual-cores in their machines. The latter would be like living in Texas and only carrying around a Smith & Wesson 317 .22 while everyone else has a .44 Magnum. It's also like a scrawny teenager going into a locker room with pro-football athletes on a 'roid binge. Inadequacy at its finest.

On the up and up, at least majority of PC gamers have what most console gamers envy: 1080p resolution. That's right, the most popular resolution (and continually gaining popularity at an adoption rate of 0.56% per month) is 1920x1080p, with 32.30% of the pie. Majority of gamers also have hard drive space between 250 and 500 GB. Not bad.

I'm curious what the Steam survey will look like in November, when the PC Master Race will be duly challenged for supremacy and the time to evolve and answer the call of the thrown gauntlet will commence? We shall see.